In the wake of dire warnings from a United Nations panel about the effects of greenhouse gas emissions on the climate, a recent study blaming 100 corporations for nearly three-quarters of the world’s emissions has been excitedly shared across the internet.

Unfortunately, it’s not quite the get-out-climate-jail-free card that it appears. But on social media, and maybe among the general public, it’s easy to see why that’s an appealing message.

It suggests that an easy solution to the climate problem would be simply regulating or shutting down a few bad actors, with no pain or sacrifice from the rest of us.

The study, written by the Carbon Disclosure Project, has a major quirk though: it shifts the blame for emissions in a controversial way. “Downstream” emissions, which occur from the use of sold products, are attributed to the original company, rather than the person using the product. So, in this study, ExxonMobil gets blamed for the emissions from the gas in your car. That’s not typically how it’s done — and it should be obvious that, however you do the accounting, any attempt to cut those downstream effects would affect the “regular people” who create them by driving their cars.

The premise of the year-old story was so tempting that it took off online, though. High profile leftists in the United States, like Bernie Sanders, saw it as an opportunity to stick up for the little guy, who they say is bearing the burden of climate change fighting schemes. On Twitter, people seemed to take a particular glee in rebuking vegans arguing that a meat-free lifestyle will save the planet.

In fact, in what appears to be the tweet mostly responsible for spreading the story, Adam Johnson from media watchdog FAIR wrote that it was a journalistic malpractice to present climate change as a “moral failing on the part of individuals,” in response to a CNN story encouraging people to eat less meat. Johnson quoted the statistic that 100 corporations are responsible for 71 per cent of global emissions and followed up his tweet with a link to a Guardian newspaper story about the study. His original tweet was retweeted nearly 40,000 times and was liked by more than 73,000 people.

Cars drive in the city centre next to Tiergarten park on October 9, 2018 in Berlin, Germany.Sean Gallup/Getty Images

And although Johnson’s tweet, and thousands of subsequent Twitter posts, misrepresent the study, it’s hard to blame him. The article in the Guardian makes no distinction between operational emissions the companies are directly responsible for and the downstream emissions often caused by regular people using products the corporations sell.

Digging a little deeper into the report gives the whole story, but a much less flamboyant headline. Downstream emissions account for 90 per cent of the total company emissions, leaving these 100 corporations responsible for about seven per cent of global emissions. And the people who buy those products? We’re on the hook for two-thirds of global emissions.

The motivation for the study doesn’t appear to be to absolve people of all responsibility in fighting climate change — in fact, it seems to be pushing for investors to take their money out of these companies — and that’s not traditionally how environmentalists have perceived the issue.

In her book, This Changes Everything, environmental activist Naomi Klein made almost the exact reverse argument, decrying the fact that countries were only responsible for emissions produced inside their own borders. Klein notes that China puts considerable greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere by creating products consumed in Western, de-industrialized countries. It’s a “deeply flawed system” that creates a “vastly distorted picture of the drivers of global emissions,” Klein argued. In essence, the people demanding the product deserve some of the blame. (Klein doesn’t seem to extend this generous argument to the Albertan oilsands, which creates emissions while exporting primarily to American consumers.)

The top company on the list of global emitters is the state-owned Chinese coal company, which is responsible for a whopping 14 per cent of global emissions.

The Klein argument is that western consumers bear some responsibility for those emissions, even if they didn’t directly create them, but people promoting the Carbon Disclosure Project study take all the onus off consumers, even if they are creating the emissions.

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